“Is he clean, or does he have a girlfriend?”
That’s the question Lizzie Kane asked herself while on a fourth date at the home of a man she was seeing.
After finishing a filet mignon dinner he had prepared, she excused herself to his bathroom, where she was met with a mix of niche, luxury skin care brands sitting on his counter and hanging on his shower rail — the kind of products, she believed, that would be unusual for a straight man to have. At least, not without the help of a woman.
Bewildered, she captured the scene on video before confronting him.
“I don’t even have that nice of products — I use Trader Joe’s skin care, to be honest,” Ms. Kane, 24, said in a phone interview. “I was like: ‘You have some really nice stuff in here. Do you have a girlfriend or something?’”
He insisted that he didn’t and said that his dermatologist sister had recommended the brands. “Afterward, when I confronted him, he did show me his whole Instacart order, so he ordered every single one of those things himself,” she said.
When Ms. Kane shared the video on TikTok, where it has now been viewed nearly seven million times, it spurred a debate about whether the man had a girlfriend. (The answer, according to the internet, was a resounding yes.)
Although she didn’t think his beauty products were a huge red flag, they were certainly a factor in Ms. Kane’s decision to stop dating him soon after.
Despite stereotypes that straight men will always go for the four-in-one cleanser, own exactly one towel and perhaps use body lotion as face cream, it’s totally acceptable — and increasingly common — for straight men to pay closer attention to their self-care, especially when skin care education is more accessible now than ever.
However, what is striking about the array of products Ms. Kane encountered is the selection: Ouai hair care, Tatcha cleanser, Paula’s Choice toners and Goop face oil — brands typically favored by women. It would be natural to assume that the source of his specific taste was a woman who knows her way around the aisles of Sephora or Ulta.
“It’s not because I don’t believe that guys can have good self-care — I absolutely believe that — but it gets to a certain point where it’s a little skeptical,” she said. “I mean, people pointed out in the video the bedazzled Charlotte Tilbury.”
Among a flurry of responses from users on TikTok and X, some jokingly called on her to “get out of THAT WOMAN’S HOME IMMEDIATELY.” Others pointed to the lavender-colored storage container as a clear sign that it was styled by a woman.
“Yeah, there’s no universe in which a man who wears Dior Sauvage also buys Caudalie and Ouai,” one user on TikTok wrote.
Others defended him, adding that he might have had an ex-girlfriend help him or wanted to make his bathroom comfortable for his dates. In a review of the comments on video, it seems as if the Charlotte Tilbury product confused viewers the most.
“After six-point-something million views, I would assume that the girlfriend would have seen it, so I really, truly don’t believe that there is a girlfriend. I do think that he’s a Patrick Bateman, if you will,” Ms. Kane said, referring to Christian Bale’s character from the film “American Psycho,” who paid special attention to his skin care when it came to his morning routine.
Ronald Gathers, 35, watched Ms. Kane’s video, and, as a straight man who has a robust skin care routine of his own, said he felt that the bathroom in question maybe had “too much” of a woman’s touch.
“You walk into my apartment and you’ll see a range of Paula’s, you’ll see some Farmacy, you’ll see a bunch of Korean skin care products,” he said. “But all that he had in the shower, it was giving hotel, just grab what you need. It was weird.”
Mr. Gathers, who is a technical product manager and bartender living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, said women he dated in the past had raised questions about some of the beauty items he owns, but it never veered into skepticism. According to him, his apartment, including his bathroom, still gives the impression that only a man lives there.
“You come to my house and you’re like, ‘He’s definitely a guy, but maybe he’s, like, ran-through, maybe he slept with a few aestheticians and he knows stuff about skin care,’” he said. “Everything I know about self-care has come from women.”
As someone who is “transparent to a fault,” Mr. Gathers said this was a conversation he could comfortably have on a first date, leaving as little room for suspicion as possible instead of being mysterious or evasive.
“If you’re sharing who you are or what you’re into,” he said, “then I think you have less of a chance of making a woman suspect that you have a girlfriend.”
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